Groundwater Governance Research Articles

Drivers of Formal, Local Groundwater Governance

How important are windows of opportunity for institutional change? This paper focuses on groundwater-related regulation and assistance in Texas since 1949. Communities adopted a common framework to form local government organizations. These groundwater conservation districts modified the prevailing open-access regime and helped water users coordinate. Droughts focus attention on water-related issues and provided excellent opportunities for change: district formation is found to have been 4.8 times more likely immediately following droughts than following non-drought years. Other factors also supported collective action for district creation: rising groundwater pumping costs, more variable precipitation, and lower farm size inequality.

Explaining the Forms of Local Groundwater Governance

Explaining the Forms of Local Groundwater Governance

Contesting expertise: The politics of environmental knowledge in northern Indian groundwater practices

The world is facing a severe water crisis. According to the UN, by 2025 50% of the world’s population will face water scarcity. In India, where 70% of irrigation and 80% of domestic needs are met with groundwater, demand for this resource is expected to exceed supply by 2020. This has led to recent calls for groundwater governance reforms within India, and specifically within the state of Rajasthan, where no regulation exists today. The success of these reforms hinges on the interaction of the state and its agents with local users and managers of groundwater resources. Underpinning these encounters, though, are tensions between local and state forms of groundwater knowledges. The question analyzed here is in what ways do conflicting environmental knowledges adversely affect the management of overexploited groundwater resources in water-scarce India? To address this question, I examine the coevolution of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence groundwater and irrigation knowledges and technologies in Rajasthan, India to expose the ways that they are produced, contested, legitimated, and hybridized. The paper argues the following three claims. First, the relationship between the state and local producers of groundwater knowledge practices is non-linear and porous. For instance, the way that state subjects experience the state is uneven because within and in-between historical moments the state may attempt to assimilate, reorganize, plagiarize, or disparage local knowledge. Second, these attempts produce or exacerbate existing historically rooted tensions between farmers and state groundwater engineers. But in response, farmers often seek out non-state avenues of expertise, such as tubewell drilling firms. This results in the further hybridization of knowledge practices and also in the present-day marginalization of the state. Third, the relationship between farmers and the state is further strained because of a current lack of state visibility in the study area and also because the state continues to “see like a state”. These shifting meanings and power relations around groundwater and irrigation knowledges produce tensions that will undoubtedly negatively impact future groundwater governance strategies.

Challenges to groundwater governance: a case study of groundwater governance in Cape Town, South Africa

This paper examines the trialogue model for governance of groundwater in Cape Town, a developing urban environment. Government processes such as legislation and level of implementation are examined. Social processes were assessed in a household survey. These included common practice in using groundwater, motivating factors or drivers, understanding of the resource and trust in government structures. A review of the scientific understanding of groundwater resources in the city is given. Government in South Africa's fledgling democracy is in a state of transformation, with responsible institutions focused on their internal organisation and less on their ability to integrate with each other and positively impact resources and society. The social views of groundwater lag behind the formal policy of a public resource, and are tied more closely to land ownership. Science has informed groundwater development in the past, but explicit uncertainty in predictions and lack of an engineering approach has limited the use of groundwater for bulk supply. Private use, however, is widespread in the middle and high income areas and increasing as water tariffs have been increased to improve water demand management (WDM). Society's impacts on groundwater currently result from indirect drivers such as WDM. The trialogue model is a useful framework within which social drivers and impacts can be mapped. However, this occurs within the broader context of society supported by natural resources and we propose a model which includes the resource base and its feedback, and governance elements of formal government, the market and the knowledge base (including science).

Groundwater irrigation and its implications for water policy in semiarid countries: the Spanish experience

Over the last decades, groundwater irrigation has become commonplace in many arid and semiarid regions worldwide, including Spain. This is largely a consequence of the advances in drilling and pumping technologies, and of the development of Hydrogeology. Compared with traditional surface water irrigation systems, groundwater irrigation offers more reliable supplies, lesser vulnerability to droughts, and ready accessibility for individual users. Economic forces influence the groundwater irrigation sector and its development. In Spain's Mediterranean regions, abstraction costs often amount to a very small fraction of the value of crops. In the inner areas, groundwater irrigation supports a more stable flow of farm income than rainfed agriculture. The social (jobs/m3) and economic (€/m3) value of groundwater irrigation generally exceeds that of surface water irrigation systems. However, poor groundwater management and legal controversies are currently at the base of Spain's social disputes over water. A thorough and transparent assessment of the relative socio-economic value of groundwater in relation to surface water irrigation might contribute to mitigate or avoid potential future conflicts. Enforcement of the European Union's Water Framework Directive may deliver better groundwater governance and a more sustainable use.

Groundwater and human development: challenges and opportunities in livelihoods and environment

At less than 1000 km3/year, the world's annual use of groundwater is 1.5% of renewable water resource but contributes a lion's share of water-induced human welfare. Global groundwater use however has increased manifold in the past 50 years; and the human race has never had to manage groundwater use on such a large scale. Sustaining the massive welfare gains groundwater development has created without ruining the resource is a key water challenge facing the world today. In exploring this challenge, we have focused a good deal on conditions of resource occurrence but less so on resource use. I offer a typology of five groundwater demand systems as Groundwater Socio-ecologies (GwSE), each embodying a unique pattern of interactions between socio-economic and ecological variables, and each facing a distinct groundwater governance challenge. During the past century, a growing corpus of experiential knowledge has accumulated in the industrialized world on managing groundwater in various uses and contexts. A daunting global groundwater issue today is to apply this knowledge intelligently to by far the more formidable challenge that has arisen in developing regions of Asia and Africa, where groundwater irrigation has evolved into a colossal anarchy supporting billions of livelihoods but threatening the resource itself.

GOUVERNe: new trends in decision support for groundwater governance issues

The GOUVERNe 1 1 Guidelines for the Organization, Use and Validation of Information Systems for Evaluating Aquifer Resources and Needs. Shared Cost Action funded by DG RTD, under Framework Programme 5 of Research—Contract No. EVK1-1999-00032; co-ordinated by the University of Versailles, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. http://neptune.c3ed.uvsq.fr/gouverne/ and http://alba.jrc.it/gouverne. project has developed a quality assured information system for the improved governance of groundwater resources at the catchment and sub-catchment levels. It required the design and implementation of a Tool to Inform Debates, Dialogues & Deliberations (TIDDD), combining traditional features of decision support systems (such as organization of the information and tools for exploitation of the information) with an awareness of the new context of management and governance in which they are embedded. Both the information contents and the ‘exploration’ tools follow the principle of progressive disclosure of information, i.e. the TIDDD does not assume an expert use but it progressively enables the exploration of scientific and technical information, as users require this. The communication style is undertaken in a transparent fashion and all materials are quality assured both in terms of scientific validation, as well as by the community of users; this is done through an appropriate quality assurance protocol for tools in a participatory decision and policy making contexts. This paper describes the process of designing and implementing such a system, as well as its potential application in management contexts. It is based on one of the four case studies of the GOUVERNe project, the Hérault Middle Valley in France.

Stagnation Without Equity: Patterns of Growth and Inequality in China's Rural Economy

When China's leaders launched rural reforms in the late 1970s, they acknowledged the nation's need to modify its commitment to egalitarianism.1 Slogans such as Tt is glorious to be rich!' and 'Some areas will lead; others will follow!' signalled this fundamental shift in ideology. Leaders backed up these exhortations with a series of concrete policy actions ? establishing the Special Economic Zones and implementing the East Coast-first policy, introducing financial reforms, and initiating the rural industrialization movement. In China's version of the 'trickle down' theory, certain core areas were to take the lead in the modernization process and provide models for other areas to later emulate. Adopting strategies that had been employed